Bob Ross Haven in the Valley
Bob Ross is one of the most well-known and influential American painters from recent decades. His video series “The Joy of Painting” teaches viewers how to paint various landscapes and still life scenes. The whole series, which is over 400 episodes long and can be found on Youtube at the official Bob Ross channel, focuses on wet-on-wet oil painting techniques that can be mastered even by complete beginners who want to learn to make beautiful natural paintings in one sitting. I have done a lot of acrylic landscape painting inspired by his famous style in the past, but most of my art now is done digitally through a popular art app called Procreate. I know from personal experience that the techniques for painting and making digital art are extremely different because of the nature of each of the mediums. Because of this, I thought it would be interesting to go back to the type of art I used to do the most often, but with a twist, and try to follow a Bob Ross painting tutorial in Procreate. I also thought it would be interesting to see how challenging it is to transfer physical art techniques into digital art platforms.
After having a random number generator choose the season and episode I would be watching, I started by making sure I had digital brushes that somewhat match the ones Bob Ross used most often. I then went through the list of paint colors listed at the beginning of the tutorial and found digital color codes that I could turn into a palette in the app.
The biggest change I had to make to my normal digital art process was actually using the blend tool. Since one of the biggest features of oil paint is that it remains very blendable for a long time, the tutorial required blending in almost every part of the painting. Another challenge was figuring out when the best times to create new layers would be. Bob Ross’s signature painting style is called wet-on-wet oil painting which doesn’t wait for the paint to dry in between layers and allows each new part of the scene to blend slightly with what’s behind it. I was not confident enough in my ability to get the techniques right the first time to do everything on one digital art layer, so I decided to create a new one each time I moved to a new major part of the painting that was clearly distinguishable from the previous one.
I think I ended up with a pretty good approximation of the painting Bob Ross created in the video I watched, but my version is definitely more abstract and has colors that are less blended together. Side by side, the two paintings look similar enough to be based on the same picture, but you can see how digital art affects the way an art piece looks despite using the same base techniques.
